In a context of "light" words, we believers are to safeguard and to ponder the words which narrate God and his self-revelation to our humanity. Out of the words of Jesus, those on the Eucharist need most to be safeguarded from routine. We must prevent them from being degraded by a senseless and tasteless repetition, to launch them again and to make them resound within the souls. In fact, these words have been left to the Church with an imperative: Do this in memory of me. It is a command that must resound as memory and, therefore, when they are repeated, they must be such as to make transparent the Presence they recall to mind.

Thus, this question arises: How can the Eucharist be lived in a time of anthropological concentration? That is, at time in which the dogma can be appreciated because of its reference to the historical condition of man? How can we witness to the precious gift of the Eucharist in our consecrated communities?  Let us, therefore, develop some reflections on the intimate nature of the Eucharist and its connection with our humanity.

Co-corporeal with Christ

Interpersonal relation is one theme to which our time is most sensitive. Man lives out of the relation that he positively builds up with others. The deep dissatisfactions of the human person depend mostly  on the disappointments of relations which are considered important and which have been broken. Now the Eucharist takes us within a very personal relation with Christ Crucified and Risen, who remains in the life of his Church for the good of all men. He comes to the ways of history, as to the disciples of Emmaus, in search of our humanity, building the relation, which binds us in a boundless friendship. As St. Augustine said, God has felt the nostalgia of man,  for which He has immersed himself into his creature and keeps on seeking it to restore with it the bond which sin had attempted  and attempts to dissolve unilaterally. The Eucharist is a bond of friendship that snatches us from every solitude.

After the Council, the communitarian dimension of the Eucharist has been rightly underlined, and it is good. However, it must be linked to an equally important aspect, namely the personal dimension of the Eucharist. One they I had the luck of concelebrating the Eucharist with the abbé Pierre, a friend of the poor and destitute. I was surprised by a gesture he made after the consecration. Before raising the Consecrated Host for the assembly, he kissed it with fervour. I had the intuition that revealed the deep relation existing between him and the Sacrament he was celebrating. The Eucharist has this deeply human dimension of friendly relation. With it we enter the relation with our destiny, which defines us and gladdens our humanity.

To avoid ambiguities, we must say that the Eucharist is Jesus, not "another" Jesus, near the historical Jesus.  The Eucharist puts us in contact with the Jesus who incarnated himself, died and rose. Thanks to the Eucharist, every believer is attracted by Jesus,  assimilating Him and being transformed into Him. In this way, the relation with Him does not remain bound to a far off past, but becomes an active and vitalising event of the present. It is in the Eucharist that Jesus realises his promise, "I shall be with you till the end of the world" (Mt 28,20), in an intimacy which has caused and continues to cause scandal.

People, first of the intellectuals of the time, got scandalised when Jesus said that the relation with Him by "eating his flesh" was a source of life. Pascasio Radberto arose uproar, when he coined the appropriate expression to say that in receiving the Eucharist the believer is made co-corporeal with Christ. This, anyhow, is the most immediate anthropological meaning of the Eucharistic sacrament: with it the believer is assimilated to Christ according to the dynamic expressed by the sacramental sign of the offered and eaten bread. When the believer nourishes himself with the Eucharist, he becomes one with Christ: he is nourished, supported, healed by a vital bond with Him. "As the divine Father sent me and I draw life from the Father, so whoever eats me will also draw life from me" (cfr Jo 6, 58). This is the promise of eternal life, the life, which realises the fullness of our destiny, thus filling it with meaning and taste.

Thus, in the daily and patient pedagogy of the encounter with the Eucharistic Sacrament, our human sensitivity also tends to mould itself in self-awareness, whose centre is no longer the solitude of our I, but the relation with the Lord. To live as consecrated persons cannot mean anything else except self-awareness made explicit with an ever more lucid clarity in the belonging to Him who is our food. This is the secret source of interior life, understood not as a vague interiorisation without object, and, therefore, like a kind of clinging on oneself "in an oriental manner!", but rather the story of a deep affectionate relation with Jesus, who donates himself more and more to our humanity up to the point in which we can say, "It is no longer I, but Christ living in me". This actually is the peak of what Jesus asks his disciples, "Remain in me!" (Jo 15, 1-11), repeated almost to the point of gasping for breath, many times in very few lines. He did this to inculcate  the method of dwelling in him as a condition for the believer to act efficaciously. "Cut off from me you can do nothing!" (Jo 15,5). In "remaining with Jesus" there is, therefore, also the source of our service and task in the world. In fact, what could ever support the fatigue with its disappointments and the few moments of joy, if not the warm security of a friendship which accompanies every activity with a love relation, giving warmth and energy to the most painful and unknown gestures?  There is no positive human movement if we do not fetch from the deep well of our interiority inhabited by a Presence that fills the gaps and the life's setbacks.

A friendship, beginning of a new humanity

The life given by Christ, therefore, is not a life deprived of its human aspect, in a spiritualistic sense, just as if the richness donated by Him were to be detached from our bodily needs, namely from our human interests, from the daily fatigue and joy, from the taste of  relations with our friends. In Jesus, there is no antithesis between body and spirit, between human and divine: just as if, in order to be spiritual, we were supposed to free ourselves from the body. Rather, Jesus took flesh so that we, too, might resume a contact with our body, that is with the concrete fullness of our humanity, through observing, following and imitating his humanity in action. The disciples saw Jesus acting in a human way and learned from him how to manage their own humanity.

Nothing belongs to us like our own human body. Thanks to an intimate unity with our spirit, the visible part of our personality expresses itself outwardly in it. In our culture there is an exaltation of the body "used" as a laboratory of satisfaction, of enjoyment of seduction. This is actually a deviated aspect of a narcissistic society. But there is also the recuperation of the body as expression and transparency of the person's intimate life, thus overcoming the condition of exile and condemnation,  which it has been subjected to, through the centuries. The body is the expressive face of our interiority. Our history flows into it, forming our personality. The same happens with the humanity of Christ. His body has not been the simple fugitive image of a now dissolved presence: Jesus has impressed his history in it and now, it shares the divine life in a glorified way, because "in him, in his bodily form, lives divinity in all its fullness" (Col 2,9).

By giving his body in the Eucharist, Christ gives himself with his history, with all the humanity he lives in our world. He offers it and attracts us to a bond, which joins our poverty to his greatness. Once embraced and assimilated in Him, we, too, can learn to be like Him. How? The exclusive interest of Christ was that of doing the will of the Father, which on one side implied a life, not kept in his hands, but received every instant from the Father;  and on the other side it demanded to put this life at the disposal of the neighbours, as the Father wanted, up to his immolation on the cross. To live the Eucharist implies, not a "devotional" attitude, but a patient journey of following, in which the same dynamics, lived by Jesu in his humanity, comes to be impressed in our own humanity. Ultimately, it means to live our life as an offering and as a relation with the other.

Thus, the true profile of our humanity emerges. The profile which was obscured by the original sin, when man had the illusion of being able to exist without his relation with the Father, in full autonomy; thus ending by being unable to relate with himself, with the brothers and sisters. This is an adolescent illusion, which every generation has to overcome in itself, by learning once again the truth journey of its humanity.

Well, when we say that Jesus has given up "his body for us", we say precisely that the principle of liberation for our humanity enters our history. In fact, his Person enters history as the beginning of freedom in love. Our humanity, in fact, becomes itself in a process of self-giving and of dialogue. If we shut up in ourselves, we wear out. By nourishing ourselves with the Eucharist, we assimilate by osmosis the paradigm of authentic humanity, because the Eucharist is communion with "Christ who lives in us" (Gal 2,20). Our personality brings to fulfilment its own potential of life, on the unique condition of transcending with the concrete offering of self and in relation with the brother and sister. The self-offering for love is the specific act of humanisation of the person.

Therefore, in the Eucharist, through the process of spiritual assimilation with Christ, we are slowly led to be in the world according to the humanity of Jesus. That is, we become able to devote ourselves to others and to enter the dialogue with out brothers and sisters. We become able of this, not so much because of our ascetic effort, but because of grace which conquers us and shows us the joy of going out of ourselves to relate with others. The Eucharist, namely the Jesus of history, who reaches our humanity with the sacrament, acts in us as an operative principle (or seed) which, with the gift of the Holy Spirit, shapes our sensitivity according to the form of Jesus, a fully human form. It is not, evidently, a magic or miraculous operation, but a change which does not mind the length of time, and it happens through an intrinsic osmosis of grace, which works without coercing the freedom of the person.

Blood shed for the remission of sins

The body of Christ given in the Eucharist is a "sacrificed body". The reference of the Eucharist to the cross of Jesus is substantial and intrinsic. The Eucharist is not a symbology taken out of the universe of human symbols, which, however, reflect true intuitions of a humanity that tries to understand its existence. The Eucharist is not simply the memory of what is already present in the human heart: namely that if life is to be lived in its fullness it must be sacrificed  because of love. Naturally, there is something exact in this, but only as in a second order of sense, which acquires significance only when what comes first and original is clear.

The original point is that the sacrament puts us in contact, actualising it in our time, with the death of Jesus sacrificed in love. Nobody can steal away his life, he gives it up by himself, freely (cfr Jo 10, 17-18). Jesus does not send anyone before him along the way of his Passion. He himself, in the first person, walks on it for others. "Whom are you looking for? If I am the one you are looking for, let these others go" (Jo 18, 8). Why does he give up life and does not keep it? Why to offer it for others,  and not simply to live it in the tentative of saving it for oneself? Why not to escape from suffering rather than subjecting oneself to it?  If Jesus and his Father had opposed that death, we would never have received the most intimate revelation of the divine nature. If the Son has lived for love with a dedication which does not stop before death, escaping the temptation asked of him to exhibit his power (cfr Lk 23, 35-39), and the Father does not stop before the suffering of His Son,  it means that both Father and Son live exclusively of love. This means also that the very essence of divine nature is love, a love that does not keep anything for itself, but is fully at our disposal. How? By sharing what is human and by descending into the nakedness where sin has confined the heart of man, into the solitude which mortifies the existence.  Jesus attracts to his scourged body all forms of human violence and lets them explode in himself. He allows himself to be tortured to prevent every other man from being humiliated and wounded. All this is the supreme revelation of God's very essence. This ransoms all the suspicion with which man has always been looking at God, as at the one who lives in the quiet of his divinity, leaving man in the condemnation of his sin. Nothing is true in all this. Rather, the sacrificed love of Jesus descends into the abyss of human misery in order to transfigure it into his own glorified body, thus allowing the ransom of every man.

The Eucharist puts us in relation with the way of acting and of being of God, so that we may be enabled to share the suffering of our brothers and sisters,

Thus, the authentic order, which reigns in the world, is expressed in the passage from the death to the life of Christ, which we share sacramentally in the Eucharist. The order of the world does not reside in power, but in love. Jesus died on the cross showing us that the power which wanted to be the master of his human life, in the illusion of erasing it for good through his death on the cross, becomes the loser. It is not the power of the world that He wins with his crucifixion, but the love of God who embraces man as his own child and attracts him to his divinity. To understand all this, we need to go again along the Passio Christi with the eyes of a child who wonders before the event.  Power challenges Jesus, "He saved others, he cannot save himself. Let him come down from the cross now, for us to see it and believe … " (Mk 15, 29-32). The miracle, the wonderful thing is that Jesus not only does not come down from the cross, but he doesn't want at all to save himself. He does exactly the contrary of what any of us would have done. While we would have used our power to avoid the humiliation of the cross, he assumes it up to his last breath, "Into your hands I commit my spirit"  (Lk 23, 46),  showing that the sense of our existence as children is to be found in his tenacious bond with the Father.

In the Eucharist, memorial of the Passion of the Lord, the victory of Christ in history is expressed, because it introduces our humanity into the ordo amoris, which is the intimate law of God, one and triune, as revealed in the whole life of Jesus of Nazareth. He, however, introduces us to it without leaving for us either a simple example or a simple instruction for spiritual use, but leaving us still at the borders of life. In the Eucharist we do not find a teaching: we find a Presence. We find Christ. Of course, we find him in the sacramental modality, since our historical condition has no other way of fetching the divine except from the mysterious efficacy of the sacrament, yet it is not less real because of this. Just as it is not less real the affection for a man, whom we do not see, yet he lives in the love we nourish for him. By virtue of the Spirit of Love, our assimilation in Christ takes place in the Eucharist, by sharing His Passion and by being involved in his love. Love creates nearness and unity even among extreme things and situations. In the order of love, nothing is desired less than this: to be assimilated, surely without confusion, but in a reciprocal relation without any reserve, thus becoming "one and the same thing" with the beloved.

This unity is the source of our acting as service of love for our brothers and sisters. As consecrated beings, we should keep in mind that we belong to a crucified God, thus we cannot expect mundane results, but we can develop in ourselves, in an unexpected way the capacity of loving our sisters and brothers, in any form they appear before us, at our own cost,  of course. This  is how our discipleship of the crucified Lord is realised. We, too, can interpret, like Jesus, our existence as a putting on the apron of charity (Jo 13, 1-17) to serve Him in the poor and the afflicted.

To build a "body" with Christ in the Church

There is another aspect to be pondered. By uniting the believer with Christ, the Eucharist unites him also to the other believers. Consequently, once assimilated sacramentally in Him, those who share the same sacramental action enter in unity among themselves. This is how the Church is born: not from the lower part, as a society organised by man, but from above, through faith and the sacraments of faith. The church is built in virtue of the body of Christ, in the sense that, through the Eucharist, she receives her specific reality of being a Church of charity.

Here we are before another anthropological gain that the Eucharist proposes: the gain of being able to discover ourselves in that unity of brothers and sisters which the heart feels as an urgency  and which practical life experiences as such a difficulty as to touch the scepticism of its being actualised.  The need of unity is a common experience. The consecrated communities feel this exigency: they express it as desire and aspiration and taste its bitter problematic. Though enwrapped by a general globalisation, the civil world finds itself immersed in the concrete life of today's men, in a, sometimes, abyssal solitude, so as to be, according to many, at the origin of all the evils of this age.  How can we, then, translate this exigency of the heart into the concrete daily life? The Eucharist shows us the way.

To live the Eucharist, in fact, implies the assumption of the mystery of communion it creates in the human heart. Being the sacrament of the redeeming sacrifice of Christ, the Eucharist, by its very nature, is the healer of all the divisions in the human heart. Its interior strength is the strength of the Spirit of the Risen Lord. Now the Spirit of Love is always a unifying energy. It heals the relations, re-invigorates the desire of the relation with others, knocks down the barriers which our fear has the tendency to build, to defend ourselves from the old fear that the other might be an invader.

When they were alone, the disciples easily divided themselves and started conflicts: with the presence of the Master they found afresh the unity among themselves. On Pentecost day, the Spirit of the Risen Lord will mould them so as to make connatural their feeling of unity, in their soul. This same dynamics is reproduced in our communities. The unification of stories, characters and different feelings cannot be reached only through our necessary efforts of harmony, but through the operation of a spiritual type. As persons in a group progress in the relation with the Eucharistic Christ, the relation among the members of the group becomes easier. With this regard I remember an episode of my youth. I was a student in philosophy and I could not bear a companion of mine because of his arrogant ways. A subtle grudge befogged my feelings towards him. I spoke of it with my spiritual father who exhorted me to start a journey of conversion. I made superhuman efforts to keep a dignified attitude with him, but the irritated sensitivity never gave a sign of quieting down. After several months, the thing started worrying my spiritual father, who changed direction all of a sudden. He told me: tomorrow see whether your companion goes for the Holy Communion. This request made me jaunty, feeling that he had entrusted to me the supervision of one who seemed to be so much unbearable. I observed him the following day and soon I could go to my spiritual father with the result of my observation. Yes, he, too, went for the communion. The spiritual father then retorted with a simple remark. Is the Jesus whom you love, to whom you want to hand over your existence and whom you have received in the Eucharist, different from the Jesus your companion has welcomed this morning? I was left speechless. I couldn't but answer in the positive, to tell the truth. That truth kept on rebounding in my heart on the following days. This put me before two challenged: either to deny the impact of Jesus in me or to change my attitude towards that companion of mine. The problem was solved in a short time, not so much because of my efforts  as because of a renewed act of faith towards the Lord whom, both of us, take as food every morning.

The presence of Christ in the Eucharist can really be a vital shake for our consecrated communities. It can awaken in them the scarce sense of fraternity, which sometimes makes them irksome. This happens on the condition of making our conscience more vigilant at his Presence. He is truly among us. The Eucharist is precisely his being with us and in us as a loving person. It is nearness beyond every expectation.  But we must dwell in Him, because our conscience often is clouded  and needs to be awaken to a sincerer and simpler faith. The Lord has wanted himself to be touched, so that our concrete humanity might be wrapped by the strength of his redemption, according to the comment oft the Gospel made by St. Augustine, "We do not go to Christ by walking, but by believing. We do not reach Christ by our bodily motion, but with the free decision of the heart. The woman, who touched the habit of Jesus, touched him more than the crowds, which were almost squeezing him.. In fact the Lord asked, "Who has touched me?" Astonished, the disciples exclaimed:  Master, the crowd around you is pushing. But Jesus said:  somebody touched me" Lk 8, 45-46). The woman touched him, while the crowd pushed him. To touch here means to believe. This is why Jesus said, "Don't cling to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father", (Jo 20, 17),  to the woman who, after his resurrection, wanted to throw herself at his feet. Just as if he wanted to say: You think that I am only what you see:  don't touch me. What does this mean? It means: you think that I am only what I appear to be,  do not believe this. This is the meaning of the words: don't touch me: I have not yet ascended to the Father": that is, for you I have not yet ascended, but actually I have never gone far from him. If she could not touch him when he was on earth, how could she touch him once he ascended to heaven? This is the way, this is the spirit with which He wants me to touch Him; this is the way He is touched by all those who touch him with faith,  now that He has ascended to the Father, now that He sits at the right hand of the Father, being equal to the Father. The Eucharist takes us back to this surprising mystery of the nearness of Christ to our life.